Two flat tires on the sage grouse expresshttps://www.hcn.org/articles/two-flat-tires-on-the-sage-grouse-express
Some interests potentially inconvenienced by the Endangered Species Act are so terrified of the law that it often succeeds best when threatened but not invoked.

So it may be with ongoing efforts to save the greater sage grouse.

In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gave states, private landowners, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management a choice: Come up with acceptable recovery plans before September 2015, or the bird gets an ESA listing.

The nightmare vision of distant, desk-bound feds dictating land use across 11 Western states has united former adversaries in the largest landscape-planning effort in the history of wildlife management. Six thousand square miles of habitat have been protected on 950 ranches. Plans for state and federal lands, still in the works, are generally fair and getting better.

But if Colorado and Utah don’t get their acts together, they may leave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service little choice but to roll out its Endangered Species Act howitzer.

In Colorado, the main problem is Gov. John Hickenlooper, who unfortunately co-chairs the sage grouse task force for the Western Governors’ Association. In an apparent effort to win re-election, he is trying to ingratiate himself with extractive industry, an impossible task because he’s a Democrat. The state doesn’t have a plan or even a strategy for helping sage grouse.

“Colorado relies on habitat mitigation, but that’s a tool, not a plan,” says Ed Arnett, energy-development point man for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Colorado Parks and Wildlife has fine sage grouse specialists who haven’t been fully engaged by the governor’s office.”

“There’s a disconnect in Colorado,” declares Audubon Wyoming director Brian Rutledge, one of the main architects of sage grouse recovery, especially in Wyoming, the state that’s setting the standard for effective efforts. “Hickenlooper thinks he’s being pro-industry. But I have industry people who tell me that what we’ve done in Wyoming is the best thing that’s happened to them because now they’ve got a rule book.”

Utah at least has a plan, though an inadequate one. It uses a three-track approach: Avoid disturbance of the leks, or bird courtship display areas; minimize other disturbances; and, as a last resort, mitigate damage. These are worthy goals, but everything is voluntary. Regulations are needed, too, especially on state lands.

In Utah, Miles Moretti was deputy director of the state’s Division of Wildlife Resources until 2006, when he left to take the reins of the Mule Deer Foundation. Now he’s a key player in a range-wide stakeholder effort called the Greater Sage Grouse Initiative. What, you might ask, have mule deer got to do with sage grouse? They’re one of at least 350 other species that also depend on our vanishing sagebrush sea.

“I see private landowners willing to work to keep the bird off the list,” says Moretti. “But I don’t have a lot of hope for Utah’s state lands. The state just wants to stop anything that keeps it from developing land and raising money.”

Rather than trying to prevent listing with effective on-the-ground habitat restoration, Utah officials have hired a lobbyist for $2 million to urge Congress to delay listing.

That lobbyist is Ryan Benson, attorney for and co-founder of Big Game Forever -- a tentacle of the Orwellian-named Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which in 2012 seduced the state Legislature into appropriating half a million dollars for a $50 coyote bounty. In 2012 and again in 2013, the Legislature appropriated $300,000 to hire Big Game Forever and Don Peay, founder of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, to lobby the U.S. Congress against “wolf reintroduction” in Utah, something the feds had never contemplated.

To figure out what needs to be done for sage grouse, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert tapped as his public-lands czarina Kathleen Clarke, who, as George W. Bush’s BLM director, endeared herself to the oil and gas industry by hosting a drilling free-for-all on some of the West’s best sage grouse habitat. The priority for Utah, she told the Salt Lake Tribune, is to whip up some science (“honest and true”) that “refutes” existing data.

The obstinacy and denial of Colorado and Utah threaten not just sage grouse and not just the creatures that depend on sagebrush. They threaten creatures all over the globe, because among the countless victims of an Endangered Species Act listing would be the act itself -- a law Congress is already itching to emasculate.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He is a longtime writer about fish and wildlife for national publications.

I have it from the suction dredgers that their hobby is an elixir for whatever ails rivers. For example, the president of Oregon's Waldo Mining District, Tom Kitchar, has informed me that by kicking up plumes of muck, dredgers actually save fish.

"More young fish survive in slightly dirty water than clear water simply because they can hide better," he declared.

And California suction dredger Ron Holt offers this defense: "We loosen impacted gravel beds for optimum spawning, and … the depressions we leave provide cold water resting spots for migrating fish, thus relieving gill rot. Every day that we come back to our mining spots our friends (the fish) are waiting for us."

What's more, all dredgers I've consulted claim their machines rid rivers of trash, lead sinkers and mercury. But somehow no aquatic biologist I've spoken with or heard about suggests that ripping out streambeds is anything but an ecological disaster.

"Is churning up hundreds of square meters of river bottom worth the 3.4 ounces of gold the average dredger collects in a season?" inquires fisheries professor Peter Moyle, of the University of California at Davis. Moyle does fish counts with a mask and snorkel, and he reports a striking lack of fish in dredged waters.

So suction dredgers are feeling unloved and unappreciated. And they're fighting back on mining websites with posts such as: "THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT – they (dredge-equipment supplier Gold Pan California) want you to sign in as Joe Public and NOT AS MINERS. Create a name like "Naturelover2" or "Fielddreamer" or "Soccermom" or something that makes you sound like you are the public and not miners. They want you to make pro-miner comments."

Despite the good press dredgers are giving themselves, they're being evicted from rivers across the West and even as far east as Maine, where this April, the Legislature overrode the veto of dredger fan Gov. Paul LePage to pass "LD 1671, An Act to Prohibit Motorized Recreational Gold Prospecting in Brook Trout and Salmon Habitat."

Also in April, the Environmental Protection Agency – aiming to save Idaho's threatened and endangered salmon, steelhead, white sturgeon and bull trout – implemented a permit system by which it is disinviting dredgers from the few rivers they haven't already been banned from by the state or the U.S. Forest Service.

Oregon has enacted a law that sharply reduces the number of dredging permits and will place a five-year moratorium on the hobby if the Legislature fails to adopt the effective protections for trout and salmon hatched by Gov. John Kitzhaber's office. California has banned dredging until it can implement a strict permitting process. So dredgers from Idaho, Oregon and California are pouring into Washington state. But legislation to kick them out of sensitive water is in the works there, too.

All this has made dredgers cross with those who oppose what the dredgers call their "mining rights" on public water. For instance, a poster on the Oregon Gold Hunters' website proposes that the ubiquitous opposition be eliminated with "high powered rifles."

Kitchar attributes public alarm about dredging to environmentalists who are plotting "to ban all mining" and anglers who "blame everyone but themselves for a lack of fish."

Let's take dredgers at their word that they cart away all the trash and sinkers they suck up. They also recover and sell a lot of the mercury. Some is natural, some left from the 19th century, when miners dumped it into sluice boxes because it stuck to and captured small flecks of gold. Mercury is relatively benign in its inorganic form, especially when sequestered in a streambed. But when dredgers stir it up and it gets away from them, as some always does, it's apt to be converted to methylmercury, a deadly neurotoxin that bioaccumulates like DDT.

As an angler who eats fish and feeds fish to my extended family, that unsettles me. And, while I'm encouraged by all the recent progress, I'd still like an answer to this question posed by Cascadia Wildlands director Bob Ferris: "Why are we letting a small, but very vocal and pugnacious minority … tear up gravel bars and riffles in waterways that have been closed to fishing because their salmon populations are too vulnerable to allow that disturbance?"

I have it from the suction dredgers that their hobby is an elixir for whatever ails rivers. For example, the president of Oregon’s Waldo Mining District, Tom Kitchar, has informed me that by kicking up plumes of muck, dredgers actually save fish.

“More young fish survive in slightly dirty water than clear water simply because they can hide better,” he declared.

And California suction dredger Ron Holt offers this defense: “We loosen impacted gravel beds for optimum spawning, and … the depressions we leave provide cold water resting spots for migrating fish, thus relieving gill rot. Every day that we come back to our mining spots our friends (the fish) are waiting for us.”

What’s more, all dredgers I’ve consulted claim their machines rid rivers of trash, lead sinkers and mercury. But somehow no aquatic biologist I’ve spoken with or heard about suggests that ripping out streambeds is anything but an ecological disaster.

“Is churning up hundreds of square meters of river bottom worth the 3.4 ounces of gold the average dredger collects in a season?” inquires fisheries professor Peter Moyle, of the University of California at Davis. Moyle does fish counts with a mask and snorkel, and he reports a striking lack of fish in dredged waters.

So suction dredgers are feeling unloved and unappreciated. And they’re fighting back on mining websites with posts such as: “THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT -- they (dredge-equipment supplier Gold Pan California) want you to sign in as Joe Public and NOT AS MINERS. Create a name like "Naturelover2" or "Fielddreamer" or "Soccermom" or something that makes you sound like you are the public and not miners. They want you to make pro-miner comments.”

Despite the good press dredgers are giving themselves, they’re being evicted from rivers across the West and even as far east as Maine, where this April, the Legislature overrode the veto of dredger fan Gov. Paul LePage to pass “LD 1671, An Act to Prohibit Motorized Recreational Gold Prospecting in Brook Trout and Salmon Habitat.”

Also in April, the Environmental Protection Agency -- aiming to save Idaho’s threatened and endangered salmon, steelhead, white sturgeon and bull trout -- implemented a permit system by which it is disinviting dredgers from the few rivers they haven’t already been banned from by the state or the U.S. Forest Service.

Oregon has enacted a law that sharply reduces the number of dredging permits and will place a five-year moratorium on the hobby if the Legislature fails to adopt the effective protections for trout and salmon hatched by Gov. John Kitzhaber’s office. California has banned dredging until it can implement a strict permitting process. So dredgers from Idaho, Oregon and California are pouring into Washington state. But legislation to kick them out of sensitive water is in the works there, too.

All this has made dredgers cross with those who oppose what the dredgers call their “mining rights” on public water. For instance, a poster on the Oregon Gold Hunters’ Website proposes that the ubiquitous opposition be eliminated with “high powered rifles.”

Kitchar attributes public alarm about dredging to environmentalists who are plotting “to ban all mining” and anglers who “blame everyone but themselves for a lack of fish.”

Let’s take dredgers at their word that they cart away all the trash and sinkers they suck up. They also recover and sell a lot of the mercury. Some is natural, some left from the 19th century, when miners dumped it into sluice boxes because it stuck to and captured small flecks of gold. Mercury is relatively benign in its inorganic form, especially when sequestered in a streambed. But when dredgers stir it up and it gets away from them, as some always does, it’s apt to be converted to methylmercury, a deadly neurotoxin that bioaccumulates like DDT.

As an angler who eats fish and feeds fish to my extended family, that unsettles me. And, while I’m encouraged by all the recent progress, I’d still like an answer to this question posed by Cascadia Wildlands director Bob Ferris: “Why are we letting a small, but very vocal and pugnacious minority … tear up gravel bars and riffles in waterways that have been closed to fishing because their salmon populations are too vulnerable to allow that disturbance?”

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He writes for Fly Rod & Reel magazine.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2014/05/28 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWhen poisoning is the solutionhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/when-poisoning-is-the-solution
A victory for an endangered fish, though some environmentalists fought hard to prevent it.One of the more spectacular success stories of the Endangered Species Act is playing out in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness of the Toiyabe-Humboldt National Forest, high in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Heroic and persevering managers of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service have prevailed in their 10-year legal battle to save America’s rarest trout -- the federally threatened Paiute cutthroat. Its entire natural habitat consists of nine miles of Silver King Creek.

Cutthroat trout subspecies of the Interior West are being hybridized off the planet by rainbow trout from the Pacific Northwest, dumped into their habitat during the age of ecological illiteracy, which ended circa 1970.

In most cases, the only hope for the natives is rotenone, a short-lived, easily neutralized, organic poison rendered from tropical plants.

But a war on rotenone has been declared by chemophobic environmentalists, who refuse to learn about it, and by anglers who don’t care what’s on the other end of the rod so long as it’s bent. Although rotenone is essential to management as defined by the Wilderness Act, the group Wilderness Watch, for example, asserts that “poison has no place in wilderness.” And Peter Moyer, founder of the Orwellian-named Wild Trout Conservation Coalition, offers this mindless defense of cutthroat trout extinction: “I am a bit of a mongrel myself.”

State and federal fisheries managers are mandated by the Endangered Species Act to save the natives by poisoning the aliens. For years, however, this work has been impeded by individuals, publications and organizations that concoct and recycle horror stories about rotenone. Apparently, they haven’t figured out that fish are wildlife, too.

The worst offenders have been Outdoor Life magazine, Range magazine,Real Fishing magazine, Friends of the Wild Swan, Beyond Pesticides, Defenders of Wildlife, two Sierra Club chapters, Wild Trout Conservation Coalition, Wilderness Watch, Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Rivers Council, Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, Friends of Silver King Creek, and the Western Environmental Law Center.

The last six of these organizations managed to derail Paiute cutthroat recovery for a full decade. They accomplished this with endless appeals and lawsuits, all based on fiction. Typical of the absurd statements about rotenone was this proclamation by the pro bono counsel for the litigants, the Western Environmental Law Center: “Unfortunately, the chemical does not just kill the fish in the water but the entire ecosystem, including turtles, snakes, frogs, birds, terrestrials, insects and other animals that live in or drink from the poisoned water.”

Rotenone used in fish recovery has never affected an ecosystem except to restore it. And it has never killed a turtle, snake, frog, bird or any terrestrial organism. Aquatic insects usually survive treatment, and the few that don’t are swiftly replaced by natural recruitment. In fact, insects frequently do better after treatment because they don’t have to contend with fish they didn’t evolve with.

Appellants and litigants claimed a “link” between rotenone and Parkinson’s disease, basing this untruth on an Emory University study in which concentrated rotenone was mainlined into rats’ jugular veins via implanted pumps. (Rotenone used in fisheries management is applied at less than 50 parts per billion.) At the end of a year and a half no rat had Parkinson’s disease. The researchers knew they couldn’t cause Parkinson’s and never intended to. They wanted to establish a “Parkinson’s-like condition” -- i.e. tremors -- in an animal model.

Appellants and litigants also claimed that rotenone threatened the rare mountain yellow-legged frog. But it was extirpated in the watershed sometime in the 20th century, probably by the very alien rainbow trout that had been extirpating Paiute cutthroats. Rotenone doesn’t affect adult frogs but can kill tadpoles, though it usually doesn’t. If frogs are present, managers delay treatment until tadpoles transform. Ironically, rotenone is being used elsewhere in the Sierras to recover yellow-legged frogs by killing the alien trout that are eating them.

With each successful appeal and lawsuit, rotenone opponents boasted that they had “saved” Silver King Creek. But last August they ran out of legal options, and the managers applied about two quarts of rotenone to the entire treatment area. In case a few hybrids survived, two more quarts will be applied next August. Then, pure Paiutes will be reintroduced.

This will be the first time humans have restored a threatened or endangered fish to 100 percent of its historic range. Maybe it’s a turning point in the war.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He writes for Fly Rod & Reel magazine.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the Range2014/03/12 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWild, free and out of controlhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/wild-free-and-out-of-control
Calling out an NBC-TV program for romanticizing wild horses on our public lands“In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” So proclaims cat-like creature Katie in the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Sharing Katie’s world are feral-horse support groups -- whose members number in the millions -- and NBC, which regularly recycles their fantasies.

For example, on May 14, the Today Show aired fictional accounts of how the Bureau of Land Management brutalizes feral livestock incorrectly called “wild horses.” As usual, the show cherry-picked commentary from ecologically illiterate extremists who want more, not fewer, feral horses on public land, and who allege that the BLM roundups, which are mandated by law, are “offensive,” “cruel” and “unnecessary.”

Never mentioning wildlife, host Lisa Myers quickly spun the issue into a simple conflict between “mustangs and powerful livestock interests who want cheap grazing on federal lands.” A revealing moment came when she asked Ginger Kathrens, one of the nation’s loudest feral-horse advocates, if she’d “rather have a wild horse starve to death and be free than live in captivity?” Kathrens answered in the affirmative.

Also never mentioned, because it would spoil NBC’s story line that everyone loves “mustangs,” is the fact the network’s CEO Steven Burke is outraged by the BLM’s plan to move 700 feral horses to a holding facility next to his Ennis, Mont., ranch. He considers it a threat to habitat and has gone to the Interior Board of Land Appeals to get it stopped.

The BLM is doing its best at an impossible job. In 1971, Congress required it to manage feral horses so as “to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the public lands.” But feral horses can’t exist anywhere in North America in “natural ecological balance” because they’re aliens here, without natural predators. The agency can’t catch a break. For avoiding effective lethal control of feral horses, it was eviscerated by the Government Accountability Office in 2008. But given the mindset of the American public, effective lethal control is politically impossible. So feral horses proliferate. Currently, there are about 40,000 animals loose on BLM lands and almost 50,000 more on perpetual welfare in BLM corrals at an annual cost to the public of $78 million. And that’s not counting the feral horses on private and tribal lands, national parks, national forests and national wildlife refuges.

The mantra from the feral-horse lobby is that because a different and diminutive equid roamed the continent before going extinct during the Pleistocene, modern horses are “native wildlife.” That’s like saying the presence of mastodons in the Lake States 10,000 years ago makes African elephants native to the Midwest.

Horses are the only ungulates on the continent with meshing top and bottom teeth and one-piece hooves. Vegetation in most of the West did not evolve to cope with these adaptations.

“When the grass between the shrubs is gone, a cow is out of luck,” says retired BLM biologist Erick Campbell, who managed feral horses for 30 years. “But a horse will stomp that plant to death to get that one last blade. When cows run out of forage the cowboys move them, but horses are out there all year.”

In Australia, where the ecological literacy rate is far higher than in the United States, feral horses are routinely shot in what Sustainability Minister Andrew McNamara accurately describes as the most humane form of control.

Between 2006 and 2011, a U.S. ban on slaughtering all horses for human consumption created a brisk export business as well as a toxic-waste problem because unwanted animals had to be euthanized with barbiturate injections. But with slaughterhouses now reopening in Oklahoma and New Mexico and probably other states, the White House is urging Congress to renew the ban.

On the Yakama Indian Reservation in southern Washington, 12,000 feral horses are nuking wildlife habitat, and tribal chair Harry Smiskin is trying to educatePresident Obama. “Certainly, the White House and the USDA have meat on their cafeteria menus,” Smiskin wrote him in March. “But for some reason, horses are considered sacrosanct. We should not manage these horses based on purely emotional arguments, storybooks or movies.”

Because I write about native ecosystems, a camera crew from the Today Showappeared at my door a few years back seeking “the wildlife side of the mustang story.” For the better part of a day, I told the reporter everything I knew and then directed her to biologists and botanists who could tell her more. When the show aired, wildlife wasn’t mentioned. Instead, America got the standard monologues about a world where the mean BLM is keeping all the happy horses from eating rainbows and pooping butterflies.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes about wildlife for national magazines and, he admits, regularly annoys people.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the Range2013/06/12 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCiting religious freedom is no excusehttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/citing-religious-freedom-is-no-excuse
Debate: Should the Hopi people continue to have the right to kill eagles for religious purposes? Ted Williams says no.Among the “cool facts” about golden eagles listed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is this: “Members of the Hopi tribe remove nestlings, raise them in captivity, and sacrifice them.”

“Cool” is not a word the Eagle Defense Network and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) would use. For the last 12 years, they’ve frightened the Interior Department away from finalizing its written plan to invite Hopi eagle collectors into the Wupatki National Monument in Arizona.

But collection goes on elsewhere in the state. For 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued the Hopi permits to take 40 golden eagle hatchlings. PEER had to sue Interior to get it to release the tribe’s complete Arizona kill from 1986 to 2012 – 512 golden eagles and 184 hawks. And that was only the reported kill.

In 2001, I was informed by Eugene Kaye, then Hopi chief of staff, that he saw no reason his people “shouldn’t” take golden eagles in violation of federal laws and that he was “pretty sure” they’d been doing it all along. He was proven correct in 2008 and 2010 when, in three separate court cases, 10 Hopi Tribe members were convicted of doing just that. Of these, nine were ordered to pay restitution fees of between $250 and $500; one was sentenced to 15 days in jail, and eight were placed on probation.

Here’s what I learned from federal biologists, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents and the Hopi: If there are two hatchlings in a nest, the Hopi take both to avoid what they now describe as an “affront to the gods." Before they helped deplete Arizona’s golden eagle population and had an easier time finding hatchlings, they took only one.

Eaglets are tethered to roofs, presented with children’s toys and told how honored they should feel for being selected for sacrifice. Occasionally their eyelids are sewn shut, and straps around their feet sometimes wear away the skin and sinew. When the birds are fully feathered, they are smothered in cornmeal or strangled by hand so they can travel to “the other world” with messages for the gods.

Other tribes, and some Hopi, object. "How would you like to be chained in the sun for 80 days?" a member of the Hopi Eagle Clan -- which reveres free eagles -- told an undercover Fish and Wildlife Service agent. The subject went on to state that his clan sometimes sneaks in and releases tethered eaglets.

"The biggest problem golden eagles have on the Hopi and Navajo reservations (which occupy about 20 percent of Arizona) is overgrazing,” declares raptor biologist Dr. David Ellis. “The primary productivity has been destroyed, so there aren't very many jackrabbits or cottontails. The eagles are hurting already, and then they get hit by Hopi. … I view the Hopi Reservation as an (eagle) black hole."

Ellis, who was chided by his superiors for his outspoken defense of raptors, got passed over for scheduled promotion and took early retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey to avoid losing benefits. Now that timid, politically correct bureaucrats aren’t hanging over his shoulders he can defend raptors as he sees fit. Hancock House is about to publish his book: “Enter the Realm of the Golden Eagle.”

Another federal raptor biologist who asked not to be identified offered this: “The criteria are there to list the golden eagle as at least threatened in northern Arizona. We might as well be putting DDT out there. There are no young birds coming along. We have absolutely no way to justify handing out 40 take permits a year. Some conservation group needs to sue us. It's a no-brain winner; if you can't win that one, you should get another lawyer.”

But litigation is unlikely. The environmental community appears terrified of being perceived as unsympathetic toward such liberal causes as religious freedom and racial and cultural tolerance.

Complaints about the ritualistic slaughter of golden eagles invariably draw charges of “environmental racism.” But here’s another definition of environmental racism -- patronizing Native Americans by pretending they are always at one with nature and then, more likely than not, quoting Chief Seattle’s inspiring pronouncements about “the earth being sacred to (his) people,” penned for him 105 years after his death by a Hollywood screen writer.

I admire and respect the Hopi. But they need to remember that, in addition to being Native Americans, they’re American citizens and that, while our Constitution guarantees complete freedom of religious belief, it does not guarantee complete freedom of religious practice. We do not, for example, permit the sacrifice by fire of live goats. It is odd and sad that we outlaw (or at least talk about) cruelty to livestock, but permit torture and the depletion of wild raptors in the name of religious freedom.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He has been writing about fish and wildlife since 1974.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2013/04/16 08:45:00 GMT-6ArticleExtreme Greenhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/extreme-green
Uncompromising environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity do more harm than good with their lawsuits, according to some critics. It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My "attack" on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major grants to groups defending wild land from developers, and I write a muckraking column for Audubon called "Incite."

Actually, I'm an extremist only as defined by people who perceive fish and wildlife as basically in the way. For those folks, all environmentalists are extremists. But radical green groups do exist, and they're engaged in an industry whose waste products are fish and wildlife.

You and I are a major source of revenue for that industry. The Interior Department must respond within 90 days to petitions to list species under the Endangered Species Act. Otherwise, petitioners like the Center for Biological Diversity get to sue and collect attorney fees from the Justice Department.

The Center also shakes down taxpayers directly from Interior Department funds under the Equal Access to Justice Act, and for missed deadlines when the agency can't keep up with the broadside of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests. The Center for Biological Diversity has two imitators -- WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project.

Kierán Suckling, who directs and helped found the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center, boasts that he engages in psychological warfare by causing stress to already stressed public servants. "They feel like their careers are being mocked and destroyed -- and they are," he told High Country News. "So they become much more willing to play by our rules."

Those rules include bending the truth like pretzel dough. For example, after the Center posted photos on its website depicting what it claimed was Arizona rancher Jim Chilton's cow-denuded grazing allotment, Chilton sued. When Chilton produced evidence that the photos showed a campsite and a parking lot, the court awarded him $600,000 in damages. Apparently this was the first successful libel suit against an environmental group, yet the case was virtually ignored by the media.

"Ranching should end," proclaims Suckling. "Good riddance." But the only problem with ranching is that it's not always done right. And even when it's done wrong, it saves land from development.

Amos Eno runs the hugely successful Yarmouth, Maine-based Resources First Foundation, an outfit that, among other things, assists ranchers who want to restore native ecosystems. Earlier, he worked at Interior's Endangered Species Office, crafting amendments to strengthen the law, then went on to direct the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Eno figures the feds could "recover and delist three dozen species" with the resources they spend responding to the Center for Biological Diversity's litigation.

"The amount of money CBD makes suing is just obscene," he told me. "They're one of the reasons the Endangered Species Act has become so dysfunctional. They deserve the designation of eco-criminals."

A senior Obama official had this to say: "CBD has probably sued Interior more than all other groups combined. They've divested that agency of any control over Endangered Species Act priorities and caused a huge drain on resources. In April, for instance, CBD petitioned to list 404 species, knowing full well that biologists can't make the required findings in 90 days."

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and his Fish and Wildlife Service director, Jamie Clark, together saved the Endangered Species Act from a hostile Congress. One way they did this was with brilliant habitat conservation plans that rewarded landowners for harboring endangered species instead of punishing them -- as the law had previously done.

A few plans were flawed, but the Center scarcely saw one that it didn't hate. "My frustration was not so much with lawsuits about listings, which fell like snowflakes," declared Babbitt, "but with litigation boiling up around the plans."

Clark offered this: "Back then, the suits came mostly from CBD. Now I think CBD and WildEarth Guardians are trying to see who can sue most. Bruce (Babbitt), who was committed to saving endangered species, gave me the air cover I needed. I have yet to see that kind of commitment in this administration. The Service isn't making progress. Citizens need to be able to petition for species in trouble, but this has become an industry."

Acquiring the public's attention seems to motivate real environmental extremists almost as much as acquiring the public's money. Recently, the Center petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the manufacture and sale of lead ammunition and fishing weights. There are lots of inexpensive, non-toxic alternatives. And lead projectiles for hunting and lead sinkers small enough to be ingested by birds do need to be banned. But the Center for Biological Diversity sought a ban on everything -- no exception for the military, outdoor or indoor target shooting, or deep-sea sinkers that ostriches couldn't swallow. It seems inconceivable that the Center didn't know its petition was going nowhere. But for a year its name has been all over the news, and now, predictably, the Center is suing EPA. The Center for Biological Diversity gives every environmentalist a bad name.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in Massachusetts.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2011/05/31 11:05:00 GMT-6ArticleWildlife fauxtographyhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/wildlife-fauxtography
If a wildlife photograph looks too perfect to be "real," it probably isn't.Ever wonder how photographers get those stunning action shots of wildlife? Cougars, lynxes, lions, tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, foxes, wolverines, leaping and snarling, fur coifed, every whisker in focus? If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Nature fakery in photography is older than flash powder, but no one goosed it along more than Walt Disney. In The Living Desert, footage of scorpions is run forward and backward to make it appear that they’re square dancing to appropriate music. In White Wilderness, the polar bear cub tumbling down a rock-strewn mountain was thrown over the side. And believing the wives’ tale that lemmings commit mass suicide, Disney paid kids to catch hundreds in Churchill, Manitoba, then transported them to Calgary, Alberta, (where lemmings don’t naturally exist) and mechanically launched them off a high cliff into the Bow River, identified as "the sea."

Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and Marty Stouffer, host of the Public Broadcasting Service’s Wild America, were as bad or worse. Perkins would throw tame animals into rivers, even over waterfalls, so sidekicks could "rescue" them; and Stouffer would stage ridiculous daylight battles between nocturnal species unlikely to interact at any hour.

Apologists for these early producers might have more credibility if the films weren’t still being hawked in DVD and aired on TV.

Modern nature fakery is more subtle. Game farms across the nation, but mostly in the West, truck animals to distant, scenic locations where they perform for "wildlife photographers." Regulations are lax, and humane treatment lacking. Minnesota Wildlife Connection sold its black bear, Cubby, for $4,650 to country music crooner Troy Gentry, who then illegally "hunted" and killed him in his pen. State records show that a company calling itself Animals of Montana euthanized eight wolves in 2007 because they were "dangerous" -- i.e., wolflike.

Until losing its license last year, Animals of Montana was patronized by many of the nation’s most prominent wildlife photographers and such notable filmmakers as the BBC, National Geographic, Dave & Di Douglas Imax producers, Turner Original Productions and Animal Planet. According to court documents, owner Troy Hyde was convicted of illegal wildlife trafficking.

On calendars, posters and magazine pages, wildlife fauxtography proliferates like vacationers’ junk mail. Many of the depicted species are endangered, but why would the public be concerned about that since it keeps encountering these animals at the bookstore, library, newsstand, subways, backs of buses and on TV? A snow leopard residing at the Triple D game farm in Kalispell, Mont., was a photographic cliché long before 2008, when an image of it won first place in the "nature" category of the National Geographic’s International Photography Contest.

Magazines like Outdoor Photographer should be leading the way. Instead, it sells advertising space to game farms and, in its November 2009 issue, ran a photo of what it captioned a "rural Montana" wolf that "suddenly strayed from the pack" to sniff the photographer’s camera and tripod -- something no wild Montana wolf would dream of doing. When I checked with the photographer, I learned there was no "pack" and that he’d rented the wolf in greater Bozeman -- at Animals of Montana.

Few calendar publishers or general-interest magazines seem to care how or where wildlife photos are made. Hook-and-bullet publications snap up images of captive fish leaping (to escape battery acid), or captive deer top-heavy with freakishly large antlers produced by drugs, diet supplements and selective breeding.

Still, there is minor progress. Three of the most respected nature magazines -- Audubon, National Geographic, and National Wildlife -- no longer knowingly accept game-farm shots. But accurate identification is hard because some photographers and most photo-stock houses don’t label game-farm images, aware that disclosure might discourage purchase.

A new voice for honesty in wildlife photojournalism is the League of Conservation Photographers, whose director, Cristina Mittermeier, finds game farms "sickening." Equally offended are genuine wildlife photographers such as Tom Carlisle, who "cringes" when he sees "endangered species portrayed as cute, cuddly and approachable in non-habitat," and Tom Mangelsen, who says he is repulsed by the "unimaginable stress" to game-farm animals from heat, boredom, noise and odors when their cages are stacked on top of each other.

Chastened by these and other dissenters, the North American Nature Photography Association voted on Feb. 16, 2010, to cease its longtime practice of running ads for game farms, selling game farms its membership list and distributing their promo. It’s a good move.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes the Incite column for Audubon magazine.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssays2010/04/15 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWhen some ranchers use poison -- just like the old dayshttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/when-some-ranchers-use-poison-just-like-the-old-days
Some ranchers in western Kansas are using a deadly biocide called Rozol to kill endangered species like the black-footed ferret."Biocides" was Rachel Carson's term for pesticides that kill indiscriminately. They haven't been much talked about since the banning of DDT and relatives in the 1970s – until now.

As Pete Gober, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's effort to save the black-footed ferret, America's most endangered mammal, put it recently: "The incredibly dumb things we did 40 years ago are coming full circle." Had I heard of a biocide called Rozol? I had not.

Rozol makes creatures that ingest it bleed from every orifice and stagger around for the week or two or three it takes them to die, attracting predators and scavengers. Whatever eats the anticoagulant-laced victim dies, too.

Rozol was registered for black-tailed-prairie dog control in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming by George W. Bush's EPA and, in May 2009, by Barack Obama's EPA in the rest of the range -- Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

Because Rozol-poisoned prairie dogs leave their burrows, people who apply the poison are legally required to return and bury carcasses. They don't and would find few carcassesif they did. As one applicator told Gober, "You put it out and you go fishing."

Prairie dogs have been eliminated from 95 percent of their habitat, and where cattle aren't overstocked there's no evidence they compete with them for grass. Moreover, prairie dogs benefit or sustain at least 150 vertebrate species including ferrets, which can't exist without them.

But Gober's agency isn't asking ranchers to stop killing prairie dogs, only to poison them with the more selective alternative, zinc phosphide. It's cheaper and easier to use -- if you assume that applicators actually take the time to obey the law and bury Rozol-contaminated carcasses.

"We've hammered EPA with our concerns about Rozol and about permitting it without consulting us on endangered species impacts," said Gober. "They just blow us off."

Pressure for expanded Rozol use is intense. Whipped to a froth of fear and loathing by the Farm Bureau and county commissions, property-rights zealots who hate all things federal save farm support are using Rozol to neutralize the Endangered Species Act and eliminate black-footed ferrets.

I found the best example in western Kansas where the Logan County Commission is exterminating ferrets and their food supply by inciting the public against prairie dogs and nuking ferret habitat with Rozol. In 2007, after a 50-year absence, ferrets were returned to Kansas because two brave and enlightened ranchers invited the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use their properties near Russell Springs as a release site.

For protecting prairie dogs and welcoming ferrets, Larry Haverfield and Gordon Barnhardt have become local pariahs. Most of their neighboring ranchers filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against them for allegedly creating a regional prairie-dog infestation.

Because Rozol is so deadly to all wildlife, the law requires that it be placed inside prairie dog holes. Instead, the county commission's applicator showed up uninvited on the Haverfield ranch, tossing Rozol-laced bait around like confetti. The state has ordered him to pay a $2,800 fine.

When I visited commission chair Carl Uhrich, he made it clear that he hates black-footed ferrets at least as much as prairie dogs. "Ranchers," he told me, "don't like having an endangered species because they bring all the federal rules with them. We sent the Fish and Wildlife Service a copy of our resolution, and they just ignored it. I said, ‘Well, you can take your ferrets and go home then.'"

The resolution, legally meaningless, wrongly calls ferrets "not indigenous" and proclaims "that no person or agency shall bring into Logan County one or more black-footed ferret or any…endangered species."

The commission has been harassing Haverfield and Barnhardt with meritless court actions. And it is vainly attempting to enforce an unconstitutional, century-old Kansas statute that authorizes it to enter private property "infested" with prairie dogs, "exterminate" them, then send the bill to the landowner.

Late last summer I joined Haverfield and Ron Klataske, the director of Audubon of Kansas, in a ferret survey organized by the Fish and Wildlife Service. I operated the spotlight while Haverfield drove. A few ferrets were seen by other volunteers, none by us.

"The surrounding landscape has been saturated with Rozol," remarked Klataske. "If any ferrets left the property, chances are they're dead."

From the perspective of the county commission, Farm Bureau and most of the ranching community, that's the whole idea.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes the Incite column for Audubon Magazine and lives in Massachusetts.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2010/01/21 09:50:41 GMT-7ArticleLet them eat copperhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/let-them-eat-copper
The National Park Service’s decision to ban lead bullets and lead fishing tackle will protect rare California condors and other creatures, including humans.I am sitting on the sun-blasted South Rim of the Grand Canyon, tracking condors through binoculars and trying to read the numbers on their wing tags as they dip and wobble above and below me. Next to me is Elaine Leslie, the heroic National Park Service biologist who never gave up on condors, even when a large element of the environmental community advocated "extinction with dignity." Without the courage and tenacity of Leslie and her fellow Park Service and San Diego Zoo condor advocates, we'd have lost these priceless ice-age artifacts to "plumbism."

Plumbism is an especially hard way for an animal or person to die. The agent is lead. Symptoms include anemia, loss of memory, depression, convulsions, brain deterioration, impotence, stillbirth, miscarriage, paralysis, kidney damage and liver damage.

"When lead is ingested or inhaled, the body ‘mistakes' it for calcium and beneficial metals, incorporating it into nerve cells and other vital tissues," explains Leslie, now with the Park Service's Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate. Many people survive plumbism, albeit with diminished motor and mental function. Wild animals usually die.

On March 5, Elaine Leslie sent me this eloquent e-mail: "!" Attached was an intra-agency memo from the Park Service's equally heroic acting director, Dan Wenk, ordering a ban on lead bullets and fishing tackle "in NPS units where those activities are authorized." Leslie flings credit around like confetti, but her fingerprints are all over this bold, belated action.

Condors were in freefall to extinction until October 2007 when another bold, belated action by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger banned lead bullets in the bird's known range. Hunters weren't much inconvenienced. Non-toxic copper bullets are more expensive but have better ballistics.

It's not just condors that are being poisoned; it's everything from eagles to hawks to bears to wolves to songbirds to people. The media paid scant attention to plumbism-by-bullet until 2008, when studies in Midwestern states turned up fragmented lead in venison donated to the poor by the "Sportsmen Against Hunger" program. And research by the North Dakota Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that people who eat wild game killed by lead bullets tend to have elevated blood levels of lead.

I'm against poisoning the poor. But that's not the only problem I have with "Sportsmen Against Hunger," which was hatched by Safari Club International in an attempt to boost an image diminished by "canned hunts," during which members purchase caged animals -- some with names -- and then shoot them. I grew up in a culture in which, if you successfully hunted something, you ate it -- a dictum that was sternly enforced even on a friend who dispatched a skunk.

I have an even greater problem with the mantra from the Safari Club and the gun lobby that all evidence of plumbism-by-bullet has been fabricated as part of a plot to disarm America.

The NRA, which fought viciously against the California lead ban, attributes such reforms to the secret agenda of "environmental and anti-gun extremists." The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance pooh-poohs the North Dakota and Centers for Disease Control studies with this non sequitur: "Hunters have been feeding their families with deer taken by lead bullets since firearms were invented."

Plumbism was first seen in ducks in 1874, but it wasn't until 1991, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got around to banning lead shot for waterfowl. When I was writing about the impending ban back in 1988, I got precisely the same response from the gun lobby I get now. NRA president James Reinke said that "anti-gunners, attacking lead shot under the guise of environmentalism, have succeeded in gaining a beachhead." Neal Knox of the Firearms Coalition called the ‘91 ban "the latest scalp in a well-organized, scarcely recognized series of flanking attacks upon the right to keep and bear arms." And Miles Brueckner of Migratory Waterfowl Hunters Inc. offered this explanation: "Someone's getting wealthy on steel shot."

I never understood why so many of my fellow hunters were fine with annually depleting their game supply by about 300,000 ducks and geese fatally poisoned by lead shot.

We've banned lead in paint, toys, gasoline and shotgun loads for waterfowl. Yet we persist in festooning the landscape with bullets made from this deadly neurotoxin. Elaine Leslie puts it this way: "It is 2009. We are better than this. Time for a change. Time to be accountable to future generations. Time to get the lead out!"

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the conservation editor for Fly Rod & Reel Magazine.

]]>No publisherPoliticsHuntingNational Park ServiceWriters on the RangeEssays2009/03/17 12:35:00 GMT-6ArticleOn second thought, Mr. Cheneyhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/on-second-thought-mr.-cheney
Ted Williams finds it more than ironic that Dick Cheney -- a well-known foe of fish and rivers -- was invited to speak at a fly-fishing museum.On the last day of 2008, a little bird told me that the venerable American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vt., a beacon for the nation's fly-fishers and a keeper of their rich tradition, had landed Vice President Dick Cheney as the guest of honor and speaker at its spring 2009 meeting. So I posted the news on a blog I run for Fly Rod & Reel magazine.

Within hours, the museum was shoveling out from a blizzard of nasty-grams. For two weeks it kept mum. Then it hatched a form letter (at this writing under review by the vice president's staff) in which it offers lengthy and incomprehensible excuses for inviting Cheney, while likening him to presidents Jimmy Carter and Franklin Roosevelt. It then implores Cheney's critics to "continue to support the museum and its mission." I will certainly do so, and to prove it, I have redrafted the form letter for the museum, at no charge:

"Dear [name]: We need to generate revenue, so we searched hard and long for a guest of honor who would fill the room at our spring meeting. Finally, we hit upon Dick Cheney, arguably the most dangerous enemy of fish in our generation. What's more, Mr. Cheney, who angles for trout in Wyoming in one of the rivers he hasn't ruined with gas and oil extraction (which happens to run through his ranch) is an accomplished and safe fly caster. In fact, he hasn't wounded even one of his fishing companions.

"We completely understand that applying green lipstick to this arch environmental villain, aptly dubbed 'Darth Vader' in fish and wildlife conservation circles, is outright whoring. But that's the genius of our plan. This kind of prostitution is legal and no less lucrative than the standard, unlawful variety.

"And please recall, from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the enormous crowds the King and the Duke were able to draw to their 'Royal Nonesuch' performances, in which the King painted himself and pranced around the stage naked and on all fours, while the Duke collected the money at the door. Sure, they eventually got themselves tarred and feathered and run out of town, but their first few gigs generated an avalanche of revenue. We're only planning one.

"Please recall also our mission statement: 'The American Museum of Fly Fishing promotes an understanding of and appreciation for the history, traditions, and practitioners, past and present, of the sport of fly fishing.' You cannot deny that a major part of that history and those traditions is the systematic destruction of rivers by special interests and the politicians who front for them. Can there be a better choice than traditional practitioner Dick Cheney -- the man who gave the West the biggest fish kill it has ever seen when he attempted to wean Klamath River chinook salmon from water, who trashed the Endangered Species Act, who virtually canceled the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, who suppressed science, who ruined the lives of dedicated resource professionals, and who ran Christine Todd Whitman out of the EPA?

"So tight is the prose of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times that these papers have been able to fit entire stories into just their headlines, i.e.: 'Dick Cheney's Last-Gasp Fight Against Clean Air' and 'Dick Cheney Battles Laura Bush over Protecting Pacific Ocean.'

"You can't believe the publicity we have generated by our decision to make the Veep our honoree. We even netted a comment from book publisher and author Nick Lyons, the unofficial dean of American fly fishers: 'As a longtime member and supporter of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, I am appalled that the museum would honor such a dreadful, dangerous man. He is the enemy of just about everything I value.'

"And no less a fishing icon than Joel Vance, past president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, offers this in his column for Outdoor Guide: 'If the fly fishing museum goes ahead with its plan to slobber over Dick Cheney, then I will boycott it…. I would have gladly paid $5 admission to see the exhibits, but not if one of them is the 'Dick Cheney Drill, Baby, Drill exhibit.'

"Finally, despite his lamentable crudeness, we'll quote our pro bono publicist, Ted Williams, who uses the vulgar term for that invasive alga, Didymosphenia geminata, now smothering fish habitat across North America: 'Thanks for the memories, Dick. We're gonna miss you like rock snot.'"

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the conservation editor for Fly Rod & Reel magazine.

]]>No publisherPoliticsFishWriters on the RangeEssays2009/01/26 17:30:00 GMT-7ArticleHow not to save salmonhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/17706
Ted Williams says killing fish, birds and sea lions to
save endangered salmon is like drinking snake-oil elixir to cure a
serious illness.For centuries, killing
predators was to fish and wildlife management what leeches were to
medicine. By the mid-20th century, even the dullest minds in
government had figured this out.

But duller minds were
yet to come. Enter the administration of George W. Bush. In 2008,
it is hawking control of salmon-eating birds, fish and mammals as
if this were Dr. Kickapoo’s Elixir for Rheum, Ague, Blindness
and Insanity.

Virtually the entire scientific community
agrees that if the four nearly useless Snake River dams remain in
place, Columbia and Snake river salmon stocks will go extinct. Even
Bush’s National Marine Fisheries Service has admitted this.
Mostly because of these dams, the system’s cohos are already
extinct, sockeyes functionally extinct and 13 stocks in 78
populations are threatened or endangered.

Yet last
October, the Fisheries Service released its draft Columbia-Snake
salmon plan that calls for a surge in the war on predators. The
surge, together with barging young salmon, increasing hatchery
production and all the other bells, whistles and tweaks that have
failed so spectacularly in the past, will cost $800 million every
year. By comparison, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates the cost
of breaching the dams at $1 billion.

There is no legal
alternative to saving and restoring Columbia-Snake river salmon.
The Endangered Species Act requires it. U.S. District Court Judge
James Redden, who declared the Fisheries Service’s previous
plan illegal in 2005, and its amended version illegal in 2006, has
threatened to vacate the administration’s current plan, in
which it trots out the ancient predator-scapegoats -- squawfish,
Caspian terns and sea lions.

Squawfish, or
“pikeminnows,” as the PC fish police have attempted to
rename them, proliferate in dam-made dead-water where they eat
ocean-bound salmon smolts, especially the ones milling around as
they strive to figure out the nearly non-existent current, and
those injured or disoriented by passing through turbines.

Although no bounty system anywhere has ever worked, the Bonneville
Power Administration is funding the biggest one in history.
Implementing this counter-insurgency are Oregon and Washington.
“How can YOU save a salmon? Go fishing!” proclaims the
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, calling to mind the
equally brainless bumper sticker popular in Idaho and Wyoming:
"Save a Deer. Kill a Wolf."

For your first 100 squawfish
you get $4 each; then $5 each. When you hit 400 fish, the bounty
rises to $8. Catch a tagged squawfish and you collect $500. Last
year, taxpayers paid out almost $1.3 million in squawfish bounties.
Yet the squawfish population remains healthy and stable: In 2000,
bounty hunters killed 187,596 fish; seven years later they killed
190,870.

Squawfish are natives. But what are the feds and
states doing about the alien smallmouth bass that also proliferate
in the tepid impoundments and that also eat smolts? Nothing;
they’re popular with license buyers who almost always release
them.

Then there are those pesky sea lions. Because
salmon out-swim them in the open sea, the fish aren’t their
natural prey. But sea lions are quick to take advantage of
unnatural situations. So they've learned to travel 140 miles up the
Columbia River and chow down on adult salmon butting into the
Bonneville dam. Last March, the Fisheries Service granted Oregon
and Washington permission to annually kill 85 sea lions.

But there are also those voracious Caspian terns, which see the
salmon hatcheries on the lower Columbia as the world’s
biggest bird feeders. By 1998, 18,000 terns were nesting on
dredge-spoil dumps. Because they were also eating wild fish, the
Fisheries Service and the Corps of Engineers set about moving the
colonies to another spoil dump closer to the Pacific. But the birds
continued to proliferate. Now the feds plan to move them yet again,
this time to six new locations, including an island the Corps will
build for them on an inland reservoir. Projected cost for the first
year: $2.4 million.

Suppose the Bush administration
prevails against squawfish, sea lions and terns. Is it then going
to pacify the rest of nature? Will it attack cormorants, which eat
more smolts than sea lions and terns combined? And what about orcas
and those smolt-swilling walleyes and coastal cutthroat trout?

One gets the impression that if seismic activity
threatened an obsolete dam, our federal government would try to
rearrange earth’s tectonic plates. On the Snake River, we can
save dams or salmon -- not both. The administration knows this. Its
war on predators is based on deception. There can be no end and no
victory.

Ted Williams is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is conservation editor for Fly Rod
& Reel magazine and lives in Vermont.

]]>No publisherWaterWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleA political fish-kill is in the makinghttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/17414
Ted Williams says the Bush administration is doing its
best to kill off an endangered fish: Montana’s fluvial
grayling.

Grayling are artifacts
from the Pleistocene, little fish of big country with flanks of
pink and silver and sail-like dorsal fins trimmed with orange and
splashed with red, white, turquoise, green and neon blue.

Fluvial grayling, the race that dwells in rivers, are common in the
Arctic and sub-arctic, but in the Rocky Mountain West, they survive
in only 4 percent of their historical range, and they’re
barely hanging on in Montana’s Upper Big Hole River system.
Should they be allowed to die out? Yes, says the Bush
administration. No, says the Endangered Species Act, which requires
the federal government to recover "distinct population segments"
that persist outside a species’ principal range. The law is
very clear on this. There is no wiggle room.

Montana’s fluvial grayling were petitioned for listing under
the act in 1982 and 1991. Both times the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service determined that they did indeed constitute a "distinct
population segment."

No legitimate researcher could
possibly have concluded otherwise. Montana’s fluvial grayling
population has been proven to be genetically unique. What’s
more, it is the only one that exists in rivers collected by the
Gulf of Mexico instead of the North Pacific, the Arctic Ocean or
Hudson Bay.

So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made
the segment a "candidate" for listing. That wasn’t good
enough for the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western
Watersheds Project, which sued the agency for clearly violating the
law. This action spawned a 2005 settlement in which the Fish and
Wildlife Service agreed to make a final determination on listing by
April 16, 2007.

Its determination -- not to list --
stunned the scientific community, including the agency’s own
biologists. In explaining the flip-flop, the Department of Interior
laid down smoke like a Navy destroyer, contradicting itself
whenever it lapsed into intelligible diction. For example, after
citing “clear heritable differences” between fluvial
and adfluvial, or lake dwelling, grayling, after referencing a
study that demonstrated these differences and after acknowledging
that adfluvial grayling cannot survive in rivers, it stated that
fluvial grayling “do not differ markedly in genetic
characteristics from adfluvial populations."

The
determination disgusted and dismayed legitimate fisheries
biologists inside and outside the Fish and Wildlife Service. Every
agency biologist who worked on grayling had strongly advocated
listing. That unanimous determination to list was reversed by
Interior’s Washington, D.C., office.

One political
appointee who loudly and aggressively inserted herself into the
process was Julie MacDonald, a civil engineer with no knowledge of
or interest in fish and wildlife. On April 30, 2007, she resigned
in disgrace after the Inspector General confirmed that she had
“been heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and
reshaping the Endangered Species Program's scientific reports" and
that she "disclosed nonpublic information to private sector
sources" which were inconvenienced by and adamantly opposed to the
Endangered Species Act.

But the only thing aberrant about
this Interior official was that she got caught. At every turn the
Bush administration has contravened, circumvented and flouted the
Endangered Species Act, and it continues to do so.

By
writing off Montana’s fluvial grayling, the administration
has discarded one of the Endangered Species Act’s most
efficient tools--“Candidate Conservation Agreement
Assurances.” This is how it had worked: In exchange for such
habitat restoration as fencing cows from the river, installing fish
ladders and screens and plugging water diversions, ranchers
received a guarantee that they wouldn’t be charged with
violating the Endangered Species Act if the population segment got
listed. “There's no hammer anymore," complains Noah Greenwald
of the Center for Biological Diversity.

And Montana Trout
Unlimited director Bruce Farling makes this observation: "The
recent Fish and Wildlife Service decision indicates that the
administration's hatred of the Endangered Species Act is so extreme
that it is willing to throw out promising examples of how the law
can work for everyone.”

It is not just illegal for
the federal government to allow fluvial grayling to flicker out in
the contiguous states. It’s a heist of priceless jewels that
belong to the world.

There may be plenty of fluvial
grayling in the far north, but Aldo Leopold’s observation in
A Sand County Almanac applies equally to the West’s
population segments of this fish and of our great bear:
“Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating
happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. He is
conservation editor of Fly Rod & Reel magazine and lives in
Grafton, Massachusetts.]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleFees have become a public-lands shakedownhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/17048
Ted Williams says charging fees to use public lands is
worse than extortion. Scarcely anyone objected in
1996, when Congress authorized the Forest Service, Bureau of Land
Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service to charge the public new or increased fees for accessing
its own land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp or walk. After
all, it was going to be an experiment -- a three-year pilot
program. Hence the name: “Fee Demonstration.”

But when it comes to federal revenue, intermittent streams have a
way of becoming perennial. Fee demo was extended in 2001, and again
in 2004, when it was expanded into the Recreation Enhancement Act.
RAT, for short, enabled the agencies to charge even more. The
system places federal land managers in the business of attracting
crowds, and it may motivate them to ignore the needs of fish and
wildlife. Recreation becomes a business.

The big
beneficiary of these access fees has been the motorized recreation
industry to which they’ve provided standing and
representation. Sponsoring Fee Demo through a cost-share
partnership with the Forest Service was the powerful American
Recreation Coalition, whose membership is comprised mainly of
manufacturers of all-terrain vehicles, motorized trail bikes, jet
skis and recreation vehicles. And joining the coalition in lobbying
aggressively for both Fee Demo and RAT have been the National Off
Highway Vehicle Coalition, the National Snowmobile Manufacturers
Association and consumers of all things motorized who band together
as the Blue Ribbon Coalition.

With little public or
congressional oversight the Forest Service assesses recreational
facilities for profitability. The ones that generate least revenue
-- remote campgrounds and trailheads, places to which lovers of
wildness and quiet would naturally gravitate -- are now first to
get disappeared. Bulldozers are knocking down campgrounds,
dismantling latrines, removing fire pits. You won’t even be
able to park. The agency is financing the process with $93 million
in fee receipts; in effect, charging you for the rope it hangs you
with.

As abusive as RAT fees are in their own right, the
Forest Service is abusing them further by playing fast and loose
with the law. The Recreation Enhancement Act requires that fees be
charged only if there has been “significant
investment,” defined as six amenities: security services,
meaning staffers who check to see if you’ve paid, parking,
toilets, picnic tables, trash receptacles, and signs.

A
site has to have all six. But the Forest Service has dreamed up a
way of getting around the law by designating sections of forest as
“High Impact Recreation Areas” (HIRAs). One corner of a
HIRA might have a sign; another, perhaps two miles away, a trash
can. Three miles from both might be a parking lot; the law makes no
reference to anything like an HIRA. The Forest Service flouts even
this bizarre interpretation of the law. Last year it admitted to
Congress that 739 HIRAs didn’t have the six amenities.
Moreover, there are at least 3,000 former Fee Demo sites outside
HIRAs that are still charging fees, many of them illegally.

When Christine Wallace, a Tucson legal secretary, refused
to pay a fee on a Coronado National Forest HIRA in Arizona, she was
prosecuted for what amounted to hiking without a license. While the
law allows the Forest Service to charge all manner of fees, it
specifically prohibits entrance fees. Accordingly, a court found
that the agency had acted illegally.

But the Forest
Service appealed, and in January 2007, won a reversal. If the
ruling is not struck down by Wallace’s motion to reconsider
or by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it seems headed,
case law will criminalize exiting your vehicle on your own public
land without first finding a ranger station, if one is open, and
coughing up money that even the motorized-recreation axis that
hatched RAT fees never intended for you to pay.

RAT fees
are more than just a ripoff. They’ve become a replacement for
squandered wealth, an incentive for continued profligacy, and an
excuse for the White House to keep slashing appropriations for
public-lands management.

Summing up the whole sorry mess
is district ranger Cid Morgan of the Angeles National Forest in
California: “We're going to have to do more with less until
we do everything with nothing.”

If Morgan and other
forest advocates hope for relief from the Forest Service’s
new director, Abigail Kimbell, who took office in February 2007,
they shouldn’t. Kimbell says she wants to /increase/ fees.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is conservation editor of Fly Rod&Reel; magazine
and frequently leaves his home in Vermont to travel the
West.]]>No publisherPublic LandsEssaysGrowth & SustainabilityWriters on the RangeArticleThey should shoot horses, shouldn't they?https://www.hcn.org/issues/336/16736
Wild horses are not native to the West, and they do not
deserve our protectionOur national obsession with keeping "wild" horses and
burros on public lands that are incapable of supporting them has
always struck me as bizarre, especially since it’s the result
of our alleged love for them. Ask most any wild horse advocacy
group and you’ll be told that wild horses are native wildlife
and anyone who wants them off the public land is fronting for the
cattle industry.

It’s true that cattle do more
damage than free-ranging horses or burros — because there are
more of them. But one horse does far more damage than one cow. And
though it’s true that a form of horse evolved in North
America, it went extinct along with other ice-age megafauna, such
as the woolly mammoth. Arguing that the modern horses unleashed by
the conquistadores are "native" to the continent because their
progenitors were here 10,000 years ago is as absurd as arguing that
elephants are native, too, because their progenitors were also here
10,000 years ago.

Unlike native ungulates, and even
unlike cattle, horses and burros have meshing incisors and solid
hoofs. The native vegetation of the arid West has evolved no
defense against them; the animals extinguish the plants, and then
starve. Montana writer Judy Blunt describes what happens next in
the New York Times of Jan. 4, 2005: "A cloud hangs over the Nevada
landscape, caused by 500 half-starved horses pounding the high
desert to powder, looking for food, stamping any remaining
waterholes into dust. The foals are long dead, left behind as they
weakened. Cowboys under contract with the BLM set out to gather the
horses and move them, but a phone call redirects them to a worse
situation in another area."

In 1972, responding to a
letter-writing campaign by passionate but ecologically illiterate
horse lovers, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro
Act, which placed all unrestrained, unclaimed horses and burros
under government care and made it a felony to kill, capture, sell
or harass one. This law compels the departments of Agriculture and
Interior to manage feral horses and burros in such a way as "to
achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the
public lands."

This sounds good, but the mission is
impossible. First, the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t
begin to have the capacity to manage feral horses and burros.
Second, horses and burros are aliens and therefore simply
can’t exist anywhere in North America in "natural ecological
balance." The Interior Department spends almost $40 million
annually to keep horses on perpetual welfare. In contrast, it
invests just $74,472 trying to keep the average threatened or
endangered species in existence.

The removal-and-adoption
program, run by the BLM, doesn’t come close to dealing with
the problem. "It’s frustrating to see them spend money in
areas that can’t maintain viable horse populations," says
Nevada Department of Wildlife habitat bureau chief Dave Pulliam.
"We see places where BLM has established a management goal of 15 or
20 horses when their own science indicates that 100 is the
threshold for viability. So why aren’t they zeroing out these
herds? Sensitive desert species like bighorns, desert tortoises and
Gila monsters can’t tolerate horses. And horses will stand
over a spring and run off other animals."

"Horses and
burros do incredible damage," says Erick Campbell, a biologist who
retired from the BLM in 2005. Campbell frequently dealt with wild
horse issues during his 30-year career. "When the grass between the
shrubs is gone, a cow is out of luck, but a horse or burro will
stomp that plant to death to get that one last blade. When cows run
out of forage, the cowboys move them or take them home, but horses
and burros are out there all year. They’re not fenced; they
can go anywhere. BLM exacerbates the problem by hauling water to
them."

The Humane Society of the United States is trying
to develop practical contraceptives deliverable in the field, but the more radical horse-lovers oppose all control — even this.
In 2005, the Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition and the Cloud
Foundation (named after a feral horse named Cloud) tried
unsuccessfully to stop the BLM from experimenting with chemical
contraception in Montana’s Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range.

"BLM has used this herd as a science experiment," says
Cloud Foundation director Ginger Kathrens. "It’s a situation
that can be managed by nature, but they (federal agents)
don’t value natural systems." When I asked her how imported
horses and burros could be considered natural, she said: "Wild
horses are native to North America."